For years, researchers have been struggling to bring immersive experiences to home entertainment. Immersive experiences with additional light sources (e.g., project lights, back-light displays, and so on) surround a big screen (e.g. TV display, monitor, and so on) have been extensively explored in the past years. Based on the observation that a larger display with a wider field of view may deliver to the user more immersed and present experience. The focus points of the recent research have been on how to extend the screen content in focus with surrounding effects or rich information to create immersive experiences. As shown in FIG. 1, the surrounding effect is not limited to the front wall. Surrounding effect can even be extended to the sidewalls and the desks in front of the user.
Many types of illusions, such as edge effects, lighting changes, starfield effects, and so on, are created to increase the user's sense of presence. It is important to realize that the efforts mentioned above are based on the Focus+Context display concept. The surrounded contexts are used to enhance the focus display, and a single content source is considered for the focus display, which is either gaming or video streaming content displayed on a TV screen.
Nowadays, mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are becoming more powerful in terms of computing and display, projectors are becoming smaller, quieter, and with higher resolution. TVs are becoming a big screen computer with easy access to the Internet and many video content providers (e.g., YouTube and Netflix), and link capacity around individual device has been significantly increased. As a result, the home entertainment systems are experiencing revolutionary changes. Many devices surround people in their daily lives, and provide various ways to access, retrieve, and view contents. People use different devices at different scenarios. For example, a user may enjoy a show on a big-screen TV at home, or on a tablet when going to a room without TV, and continue the experience on a smartphone when stepping out of the house. Such continuous and seamless viewing experience requires collaboration among devices and intelligence in determining user intension.
The usage model of the main screen is experiencing transition from only single content source to support multiple content sources. In 2014, Samsung released its Multi-Link Screen product that can let user display up to four screens on a UHD TV or two screens on a Full HD TV simultaneously on one screen to support the ultimate multi-viewing experience, so that the user can watch TV and YouTube videos, browse the web and watch TV, watch two different TV shows at the same time, or watch TV and play with apps.
Overall, immersive entertainment is expected to be a collaborative effort among devices, users and content. The disclosed method and system are directed to solve one or more problems in this area. It should be noted that, unless explicitly acknowledged, the above background information is part of the present disclosure and is not intended to be prior art.